The Last Warner Woman (18 page)

Shhhhhhhhh

Before today, the shape of my days was simple. Mr. Writer Man would wake me at around six thirty in the morning and set a cup of green tea before me and a cup of coffee before himself. We would be in the living room, the steam rising from the cups, and the tape recorder between us. He would allow me to talk, sometimes for as long as an hour and then I don’t know how he decide, but it come a time when he touch the tape recorder and say,
all right Ada, that’s enough for today.
He pick up the recording machine and go into a room that have his computer and plenty books rising up to the ceiling. When he in there he don’t pay me no mind. I think it is like another world to him. The phone might be ringing. The house could be burning down. He wouldn’t care. The door not shut but he still shut off to everything. He play the recording a little bit at a time, then he type things into the computer. Sometimes I pass and notice he not listening or typing; he ongly staring like a man might stare at an angel or a white dove, as if a message is out there and he praying for revelation. Now, whenever he gone into that room to do his work, I pick up a key and take myself out of the apartment. I go down the stairs and out into the streets. The roads have their names but I don’t stop to read them. I can tell you though which road make the shape of an
S
, and which one is just a straight line with the first part wide and the last part narrow. And I can tell which one have red bricks in the middle, and which one is black gravel the whole way. I walk the same route always and sit in the same park and watch the same heron in the tree stretching forth his two wings like maybe he think he is the Savior and him want to be crucified. On the walk back it is always the same people who line up at a bakery called Gregg. The place have a smell of cheese and sugar, and although I don’t eat cheese as a rule, and I never frighten for sugar, the smell still make my belly complain for hunger. When I reach back to the apartment Mr. Writer Man will be sitting at the table eating bread and butter and eggs. He will nod for me to join him, so I sit down and we eat in silence. I begin to wonder if the ongly way we can ever talk is to have a machine between us, if we can ongly exchange words if a record of those words is kept. Most mornings he just stare at me and it make me feel funny. In turn I stare at the bread, or at the butter, or at everything but him. I act like I don’t notice his eyes. They is green like the underside of a banana leaf. He just keep looking as if he hoping something will happen but nothing ever happen. Another time it is me who stare at him, because sometimes is like a ghost will pass over his face, like a shadow of something I did once know. I stare at him whenever I see this and he now is the one to pretend he don’t notice me, but his whole body change in these moments. It get tight and relaxed and nervous all at once, and you would think he is offering his whole self to me, like a lamb who want to be found worthy. I just stare and is like his body finally give up and become downcast. At last him will get up and touch me on my shoulders and that is his way of saying good-bye. He leave to go wherever it is him go off to in the days. I don’t ask him nothing before he leave, not even to know when he coming back.

Shhhhhhhhh

When he leave I always do the same thing. I did feel like a burglar at first, but now I don’t feel no way. It is just the shape of my day. I go into the same room with the same computer and all the books and I sit down in his chair. I take up the papers that him print out that morning and I read back everything that he write. When somebody write out your story, to read it is like a forgetting and also it is like a memory. At first I forget this story is supposed to be bout me. I read it just like I would read any Anansi story. I turn the pages to find out what going to happen next. But a little later I reading and I shaking with vexation. All on a sudden I know this woman him writing bout is me, and these people he telling untruths bout is people I did used to know. When time that happen I keep thinking—what right this boy think he have to change it all up? Who make him god of anything? But when I think that I get a strange thought. I stop to wonder if he might really be God after all. I have seen paintings of the Messiah. He is a man with long curly black hair and what they call olive skin, and his eyes is green like the underside of a banana leaf. And so I wonder if Mr. Writer Man might be Jesus after all. And not simply because of the way him look, but also the way he sometimes write down parts of my life that I never did tell him. I start to consider the woman at the well who the Savior did meet. Him tell her to her face,
thou hast had five husbands and the one you living with now is not one of them.
And same so, the woman get fraid and she run off to tell the town,
Come, see a man who tell me all the things that I ever did, is this not the Christ?

Shhhhhhhhh

What I trying to tell you is this—that every morning when I go into the room and I read out my story as it is written by Mr. Writer Man, sometimes it vex up my spirit for true, but it soothe me at the same time. And it heal me. For is like the Savior telling me all the things I ever did, and giving me back my whole life. The parts that did fall away, they rise back again. Roads that did fade into dust was being restored. This man don’t tell the story straight. He put in all kinds of lies. But every lie open the door to a truth. What I trying to tell you is this—that maybe I was ready to give thanks unto this man. I was ready to give thanks to him for giving me back all I think I did lose. But take heed, Children of Zion. Take heed. When things going too well, when you think God has remembered you at last, God will remember to forget you again.

Shhhhhhhhh

When the boy leave the apartment this morning, I get up as usual and go to the room. I surprise to find the door shut. I try to turn the handle but the door don’t give no way. I never know before the door could shut let alone that it could lock so tight. I start to shake it but ongly my body was rocking. It come to me then that it was my own self on the other side of that door. Mr. Writer Man decide to keep me away from myself. I now know for sure something I did come to suspect. Mr. Writer Man know my habits. He know I was coming to read what him write bout me. But today he write something that he don’t care for me to read. I start to shout out, Adamine! Adamine! If you is there on the nother side, let me in. That never work, so I call out,
Writer Man. Writer Man!
I shout it out,
Writer Man, come open this door and let me see what the hell you have done to me! What is it you write that I cannot see?
But he don’t answer me because he was really gone for the day. He gone and the day start to lose its shape. Apocalypse begin. I feel the madness come back to split me in two. And the place feel dark though I know, I know, I know that I was in a bright place. I know I could walk out right then and go into the streets. But it did feel to me like I was in a room again. A terrible room where the walls was soft and no light could get in. Water start run down my face because I feel the darkness pressing down on me, and the Savior, who was supposed to come and let me out of every goddamn place they ever lock me up in, wasn’t there to let me out. And I did start to think, how the hell I reach here again? How I really reach back here? I had to put my hands on the side of my head to prevent every thought from slipping out and scattering. I had to start counting from one to whatever number I could manage to reach. I had to start saying my
ABC
. I had to say my mother’s name. I had to say my own name. Whatever I know for a fact I just keep on saying that thing to steady my nerves. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four, five. A, B, C, D, E, F, G. My mama’s name was Pearline Portious. My husband’s name was Milton Dehaney. My own name is Adamine Bustamante. Yes indeedy, my name is Adamine Bustamante and I did born amongst the lepers.

Shhhhhhhhh

Well hear me now, and study this lesson: every story have its own mind, its own opinion on things. And every story have its own legs; it can walk bout whenever it want. And every story have its own mouth, so it can talk, or else it can keep quiet. Hear that and understand this warning. If Mr. Writer Man can lock his door then this story can lock its mouth. Let him continue with his make-up fairytale, but let him continue without me, for I not sharing one more word with him. If he want to carry on he will just have to find those who can offer their piece of the story. For nothing in this world happen by itself just so. Every story have its own witnesses, its Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

PART THREE

in which others bear witness to the story

M
ILTON DEHANEY IS A DISHEVELED MAN WHO LIVES IN
a disheveled flat. While there has been some attempt to tidy up, a space cleared so that I can sit down, I can see that on most days he lives in a space that would kindly be called eclectic. Once I have wedged my way into the cleared space on the musty brown couch, he begins to talk straight away. I am almost thankful that there is no offer of tea or biscuits because I would be suspicious of anything unearthed from a cupboard in this flat. I am so busy fumbling to turn on the tape recorder that I miss his first remarks, but it seems he is admitting that on the morning he met my mother, Adamine Bustamante, he was in a rather grumpy mood.

Everyone but him seemed glad to be at the airport that morning. It appeared that there were more smiles than faces to house those smiles, and all the faces were dark and glistening, as if oil had been rubbed on them. The air was thick with the sweet smell of cocoa butter, so thick that Milton scowled and wrinkled his fat nose. He, of course, does not tell me that his nose was fat, but I see that it is fat now and it was most likely fat then because a nose is one of those things that generally does not lose or gain weight.

“You could always depend on those people to shame you,” he tells me, “because don’t care how they travel far from their little no-name islands, they still take their ignorant and low-rated ways with them. They can’t change.”

Ignorant and low-rated.
It is an opinion he pronounces liberally, applying it to many people, but most especially to my mother, who was the person he had gone to meet that morning. She was his wife-to-be. When she was finally delivered through the airport doors, toting her luggage behind her, Milton’s heart fell, became a useless limp thing inside his chest. He had never laid eyes on her before but he recognized her with that fatalistic certainty that some people have—an expectation that life keeps on throwing up shit and that every situation will turn out for the worst. So this woman with the far-too-serious eyes, this unattractive and buffoonish-looking woman, was bound to be the one he was waiting on.

As he narrates the encounter, Milton does what I imagine he did then: he looks up at the ceiling and shakes his head. He describes her. She had the elaborate headtie of a Revivalist, a pair of scissors swinging from a rope around her waist, and three pencils stuck behind her ear. Her dress, he concedes, was spanking new, but this only served to highlight the crudeness of its stitching, the simplicity of its design, as if this woman had picked it up from some low-rated dressmaker that very morning. The light cotton material was of course inappropriate for the British weather.

Milton sighed but waved a dispirited hand in her direction as she approached.

The Revivalist woman looked at him briefly, and then walked on by with such determination that Milton felt a little silly, and then relieved. It wasn’t her after all. Thank God. He turned his gaze back to the airport doors, which were steadily delivering more and more passengers onto England. Milton now allowed himself to hope that his new wife would be something like his previous wife, Doris.

Doris Dehaney had died the year before. She had always been a sickly woman, even when they had lived together in Jamaica. As Milton tells it, she had asthma; high blood pressure; low blood sugar; and she fainted regularly. There was almost nothing that poor Doris hadn’t been afflicted with. After she had migrated to England, the eventual combination of hayfever in the summer, bronchitis in the autumn and influenza in the winter had been too much for her delicate system. Without much of a fight, she had succumbed.